


Perspectives at Night

by Hopie (hopiecat)



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Drabble Collection, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:34:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopiecat/pseuds/Hopie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peaceful nights in espionage are a rarity but, really, the job never does leave you alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. James

The flat has just been built and smells of paint and slapdash lunch, and James doesn’t really like it because it doesn’t have the view he prefers: the sight of the Thames snaking through the city. Instead, what he sees through his windows are more windows and more blocks, walls and walls of windows and rubble. It’s freedom of a sense, James supposes, but a tiger in a reservation never really does notice the bars.

 

Half his bottle of whisky is gone and his hand doesn’t shake. _A man of talents_ , black-inked on his reports; well, the shrink ought to see him now. Tanked out of his mind, and still, his hand doesn’t shake.

 

James chuckles, a hollow, wet sound, and eschews the glass for a swig from the bottle. It scalds his throat like –

 

\-- _cyanide_? Rotting teeth and mush gums. Nasty piece of business.

 

He touches his right molar with the tip of his tongue, considering, and stands up.

 

James is thirty to fifty and built out of Greek profiles and Roman emperors and, currently, he feels very sick. His suit hangs onto him, it’s from some other sod in the double oh branch. His head hurts, but that’s alright, headache never killed anyone. _Not like a toothache_ , he thinks, and smashes the balcony door open with his shoulder.

 

It’s cold and high and lonely, really, being on a balcony in Central London; the streets below are knotted tight and sleek flickers of light glow like embers in a furnace, and he’s just high enough to know that it’s not a dream but not really high enough to tick off ‘delusion’. Mist rolls up from the banks of the invisible Thames and swallows half the distance, the rest becoming silvered shadows which the whiskey in his head turns magical.

 

It’s a comforting sight, that fog. Sign of London. Sign of the Thames. Sign of what is, arguably, home.

 

James rests his elbows on the sandpapered ledge and stares at the fog.

 

One of these days, very soon, he will become Silva. This is fact, inevitable as aging. Perhaps it’s already begun – war has shed its shadows and secrets a long time ago, and there’s a new kind of warfare, one that’s open and shiny and impersonal. James is not good at it, this is another fact.

 

So, he will die, very soon. Or he will be captured. The thought of retirement is about as repulsive as these options. What will he do with retirement? James inclines his head towards the whiskey bottle, debating it.

 

He thinks he would, perhaps, go back to Scotland.

 

“Open a pub,” James thinks aloud, and it sounds nearly as absurd as it did in his head.

 

He chuckles – it’ll never happen – and drinks with the knowledge that caged tigers rarely die free.


	2. Q

Q wakes up gasping and clutching at his mouth, thoroughly disturbing the odd twenty-pounds of cat asleep cosily on his chest. He bounds up and out of bed, dropping the cat to the floor, and his eyes dart into all the corners to check for monsters.

 

All his long, lean limbs are shaking, and Q paces back to the bed, sits down and curls up tight into a ball.

 

It’s the third bloody time this week, and if he didn’t have such an aversion for the shrink appointed to MI6, he’d have gone after the first. There’s really nothing pleasant about dreaming of gap mouths and waking up shaking in your bed, and the real galling bit of it is that it’s Q’s own fault.

 

He gives a great shudder. The cat, unable to show displeasure by any other means, hops back onto the bed, marches across his thighs and nests on his pillow.

 

Q gets up and lights the fire, feeling slightly foolish. He pulls a chair close to it, folds himself on an overstuffed French-fabric pillow, and stares at the flames eating away at a piece of log.

 

Espionage is an understandably difficult piece of business, but there’s a sort of disconnect, really, when it comes to the real nitty-gritty of espionage. To understanding not what it _is_ , but what it does to the people inside it. Well, really, just look at Bond -- as much as he admires him, Q knows that a life _as Bond_ is blatantly unhealthy and possibly prone to high risks of heart-failure.

 

He admires Bond, though, and Q doesn’t go for the brash type.

 

Bond, however, is admirable and out of reach and completely different from the real world. Q thinks of him much in the same way as a halberd – a brutal piece of weaponry, able to kill as good as any gun, but outdated. With tactics as they are – and Q can barely believe that he, of all people, _he_ is entrusted to know these things – Bond is merely a piece of museum equipment still in play.

 

Q can’t sit here any longer.

 

He gets up and goes to the kitchen.

 

The house in Cheam is another relic, something away from the boxy flats of Central London. The walls are real stone, the house has a thatched and sloped roof, and occasionally, one comes across a window like the one in his kitchen; something straight out of high fantasy, all graceful arches and Baroque lines. His window overlooks a garden, rigorously maintained by a three-times-a-week gardener and kept free of mice by Sebastian.

 

The kettle boils; Q pours in water, milk, a tea-bag then, sneakily, a capful of gin.

 

He sits at the table with it, steam rising and fogging his glasses, and folds his hands together.

 

Bond, then.

 

Bond is a relic.

 

But Q – this is galling to admit, it tastes like metal on his tongue – let Silva out. Now, he can’t remember what he was thinking, how he didn’t see that ploy, how he played directly into Silva’s hands; it’s infuriating, to be out-done by someone half-crazy—

 

\--but if he thinks of it in terms of Silva as merely being ‘good at his job’, then it makes a smidge more sense. It’s still infuriating. He’s a clever man. He should’ve seen it. He should’ve known. Bond did.

 

Q can recall now, in the safety of his little kitchen, Bond realizing and fleeing the room, minutes before he’d known. How he’d gone directly to M’s hearing and taken her away. How he, then, had disappeared – traceless, it had taken days for Q to find him again. How, without trying, Bond had reasserted his own power, his own brilliance, his own _core strength_.

 

In comparison, Q felt young, and foolish, and that would pass tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever an escaped MI6 agent tried the same stuff again. He will gain experience; he will learn.

 

However, now and here and with a hot cup of tea and the nightmares mostly a collection of shadow puppetry, Q can admit to himself that relics are sometimes essential.


End file.
